The flaming skull of Perseus

In the heart of the Perseus cluster of galaxies lies the monster Perseus A, a huge galaxy that is blasting out X-rays. In this image by the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory, the galaxy is between the two "eyes", which are most likely gigantic bubbles of gas expanding away from the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy. Those dark regions are each half the size of our own Milky Way galaxy, 100,000 light years across!

The Witch's Head

The knee of Orion is marked by the bright star Rigel, and just off to the side is the large glowing Witch Head nebula, which really does look like a classic depiction of a hag's face: open-mouth, scraggly nose, deep eyes, gaping as she looks off to the right.

The running ghost

What scares a ghost? Something must have frightened this poor guy, since he's running for his... uh... life? Death? Whatever.

This is one of my favorite nebulae in the sky, and if it looks familiar, it should: in a bizarre - and literal - twist of fate, it's actually the picture of the Witch Head Nebula turned sideways!

I love that you can take an astronomical picture related to Halloween, turn it 90 degrees, and get a different Halloween picture! Turn your head to the left to see the Witch.

If you have a hard time seeing it, the ghost is running to the right; the upswept arc on the right is his arm (the Witch's chin), his head is the bump to the left (the Witch's lip), his other arm is the arc on the left (the Witch's nose), and his ghostly feet dangle below.

Spectre of the star

Adam Block is a fantastic astrophotographer, using the 0.8 meter Schumann telescope in Arizona to take incredible images. This one shows gas and dust around the very young star V633 Cas, still in the throes of birth. When human babies are born, they scream, and from the looks of this star it is, too. But oits age is estimated as more than 30,000 years, which is a long, long time to wail...

Angry nebula is really angry

160,000 light years from home, the Tarantula nebula (how's that for a Halloweeny name?) is a factory cranking out thousands of stars. Some of these stars are so luminous they have heated the gas to millions of degrees, and this expanding hot gas (in blue) has pushed open bubbles in the cooler gas around them (red).

And if that were happening inside of you, I imagine you'd be screaming in fury as well.

I spy an Aspen eye... bleeding

In 2012, my wife and I hosted a group of science enthusiasts to a vacation at the C Lazy U dude ranch as part of Science Getaways - vacations with extra bonus science added. While out on our biology hike, we saw vast groves of aspen trees, and learned that they reproduce themselves by sending up runners from their rooots - clones, essentially.

One, though, must've suffered an error during the DNA transcription. Unless there's some evolutionary benefit for an aspen tree to have a bleeding eye in its trunk.

Screaming volcano

This seriously disturbing image is not actually a photo, and it's not actually an astronomical object! It's an image of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland when it was erupting in 2010, made using radar observations.

The stern look of NGC 2467

A vast cloud of gas surrounding two huge clusters of stars stares at you, glaring, knowing you should be working and not reading Halloween blogs.

Or is that your conscience speaking? This is actually a star-forming cloud called NGC 2467, as seen by the MPG/ESO telescope in Chile. Each eye is actually a cluster of stars, blowing huge holes in the gas cloud, forming what looks like two colorful eyes burning a hole into your very soul.

I have to note: this object is in the constellation of Puppis, the stern of a cosmic ship. So this really is a stern glare!

Give a little bit of heart and skull

But really it's a vast cloud of gas furiously churning out stars. The winds of subatomic particles and fierce light from those newborn stars carve out cavities in the gas, leaving what look like eye sockets and a nasal bone in a huge green skull.

I have to say... it looks a lot like the very creepy aliens called "The Silence" from Doctor Who.

This image was taken by astronomer César Cantú, who has dozens of other stunning astronomical photos on his site... but none quite so creepy.

The mourning woman at the Milky Way's heart

At the center of our Milky Way galaxy lurks a massive black hole, which, for the moment, is quiet. The surrounding material barely glows in radio waves, but there, off to the right... is that the baleful face of a woman, just a half a light year from the monster? Why is she sad? What is she mourning?

Perhaps she perceives her own fate: being twisted around, the gas making up her visage warped and wrapped as it circles that black hole over thousands of years, eventually, it may be, to take the final plunge into eterity.